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Mac outliners, one-pane, modeless and general-purpose like text editors?
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Posted by David Dunham
Jun 30, 2009 at 09:46 PM
Derek Peschel wrote:
>I may have been thinking of another program when I
>mentioned modes, but Opal does make a distinction between selecting an entire topic
>and selecting the entire contents of a topic. Is it always possible to select anything
>with the keyboard?
Right, but that’s not a mode. It’s a selection, like selecting an icon in Finder, or the icon’s label. You can select text or topics. (Opal supports multiple topic selection.) It should always be possible to select with the keyboard.
>One thing I do know: with the right prefs, you can use return and
>the indentation keys to add a series of topics and their contents. But delete doesn’t
>backspace across topics (that I’ve found), so right there Opal doesn’t give
>text-editor-style behavior.
Well, no. It’s an outliner. You can hold down backspace to get a fresh start on the topic. And you wouldn’t want to delete the line ending that a text editor would use, lots of the time you wouldn’t end up with a valid outline.
>Incidentally, the help says to use System
>Preferences to set the keyboard shortcuts. Opal isn’t on the list, however. Is that
>because I am running the trial version from downloaded files, rather than as an
>installed package?
That shouldn’t make a difference. As it happens, a recent review went into some detail on this so I’ll just point to it: http://themacosxguru.blogspot.com/2009/06/opal-old-school-in-nicest-possible-way.html
Posted by Derek Peschel
Jul 1, 2009 at 08:24 PM
A quoted reply hasn’t been working for me (page doesn’t finish loading or is blank).
David, you’re right about deletion. What does it mean for the backward or forward delete key to join topics? In general that would cause a topic to move into another topic’s place, and you would have to define what that operation does to the whole outline and when it should be possible. But consider a specific situation. I’ve just typed some indentation commands to create a new topic at the bottom of the document, and I’ve typed some text. I can backspace over the text. It would be nice to have one more backspace get rid of the new topic and put the insertion point at the end of the topic that’s now at the bottom of the document. I can’t see how that specific operation can ever be unsafe. Forward delete at the beginning of the document is generally unsafe, though.
The review’s description of keyboard shortcuts helped. I thought that Opal could add its entire set of menu commands to the list of keyboard shortcuts, in the same way the OS commands are always listed.
Posted by David Dunham
Jul 2, 2009 at 01:39 AM
Derek Peschel wrote:
>But consider a specific situation. ... I can’t see how that specific
>operation can ever be unsafe. Forward delete at the beginning of the document is
>generally unsafe, though.
I’m sure there are situations where it’d be useful. But I tend to design with an eye to the general. There are more situations where it couldn’t work, and that give you unpredictable behavior. You can always delete the current topic by tab backspace.
FWIW, if Opal had Join, it wouldn’t use backspace as a keyboard equivalent. You’d need to be able to select multiple topics to join and then join them.
>The review’s description of keyboard shortcuts
>helped. I thought that Opal could add its entire set of menu commands to the list of
>keyboard shortcuts, in the same way the OS commands are always listed.
But if Word did that, you’d be scrolling forever and never be able to find anything ...
The OS commands are listed because there’s no place else to find them. Opal’s (or Word’s) menus are available from Opal (or Word). And some of them are context sensitive, or don’t appear until you hold Option (e.g. Split Daughter).
Posted by Cassius
Jul 2, 2009 at 04:13 AM
2 cents: My son has just written a 300(?) page nonfiction book to be published in September and the publisher has already asked him to write one or two more. He tells me for fiction or nonfiction he only uses MS Word on a Mac. He feels that using additional software for initial or intermediate steps just adds unnecessary complications and wastes time. (For video game scripts he used something else.)
Posted by Stephen R. Diamond
Jul 3, 2009 at 06:54 PM
Does the outliner in the Mac version of MS Word have any significant capabilities that the Windows version lacks?
In some ways, Word’s outliner is more powerful than any dedicated Windows outliner. I wouldn’t try writing a book on Word start to finish because of only a single deficit: the inability to select and drag multiple headings in outline view. I wonder if the Mac version has this capability. (I’d guess the answer is ‘no.’)
Cassius wrote:
>2 cents: My son has just written a 300(?) page nonfiction book to be published in
>September and the publisher has already asked him to write one or two more. He tells me
>for fiction or nonfiction he only uses MS Word on a Mac. He feels that using additional
>software for initial or intermediate steps just adds unnecessary complications and
>wastes time. (For video game scripts he used something else.)